Rosehip liqueur for Epiphany

On the road up to the old monastery in Norcia, February 2, 2015.

Well, I've finally figured out what to do with rosehips. I've just made a big batch of rosehip liqueur.

The problem with them is that they're difficult to process and incredibly acidic. You can't make them into jelly or jam since the pectin just won't work with that level of acidity. You can use them to flavour crabapple jelly, but you have to be pretty sparing with the juice. All my efforts have only ever produced rosehip syrup, but of course, there's nothing whatever wrong with that. I tried rosehip wine - the ancient Romans loved it! - but just couldn't get the yeast to not die. And the end result was too acidic to drink without adding a dollop of honey. But they remain one of my favourite fruits - I think I just can't resist their beautiful colour. So, this evening I tried again, and I think I've got it figured.

They're delicious, and amazingly good for you. Dog roses, that is, wild roses, have a fruit with the highest concentration of Vitamin C of any fruit we know about in the western world. But they're a pain to process. The scrapes and scratches you can't help getting picking them is only the beginning. The fruit encloses a little pill of hard seeds that are each covered in extremely fine, but very unpalatable hairs, like extremely fine cactus hairs. They are very unpleasant to get in your skin, and even worse to get in your mouth. The leathery case of the hip is the fruit part that you want, but they're difficult to separate from their seeds. So you have to boil them and then strain out the bits you don't want.

The best time is late December, last week before January 1. They've had all summer and autumn to ripen - and this was a particularly good year with a good balance of heat and rain - and then the first frosts have softened them. By the last week of December (in Norcia, which means only a couple of weeks of steady hard frosts) most of the fruits are still red, though by the beginning of the first week of January they will all have turned black, and there won't be any more until next year.

By that time, they're wonderful straight off the bush. You choose the ones with the best colour, brilliant scarlet, and nice smooth skin with no sign of wrinkling or discolouring.

Pick it carefully off the stem which should come away from the fruit leaving a little hole in the skin. You squeeze them gently between thumb and forefinger and this red pasty stuff comes out the hole like toothpaste out of a tube. This is the fruit and it's absolutely delicious at this point just to eat straight. Three or four is vitamin C for a week.

If you're picking them for cooking, bring along a long-handled umbrella with a hook on the end to pull the higher canes down, since the plants on the hedgerows often get ten feet in height. They're usually most abundant on the upper parts of the plant, and the parts that get the most sun in the day (though in a hot country like Italy this can mean smaller and harder fruits, since the sun can be hot enough in the summers to blight the fruit.)

The soft late season fruits can be pretty squishy, so make sure you bring a big zip lock freezer bag, something sturdy. Not a shopping back, since they tear too easily. Collect them most easily with a pair of kitchen scissors, and a plastic bag that has a handle you can slip over one wrist. The fruits grow in little clusters of two or three or sometimes four; take these gently in your left hand and use the scissors to cut the stems all at once, and drop them into the bag.

Don't try to pull the thorny canes or move them aside; just use the scissors to cut away any pointy bits that are between your hand and the fruit. Don't reach into a big bunch of thorny canes or twigs to get the fruit. Just cut away and clear a path for your hand, and use the scissors to toss away the cut canes and twigs; don't grab them with your fingers. Don't worry about the plant; the rose family loves to be pruned and the more you cut in December the more fruit there will be next year.

I picked about 1.5 kg and just tossed them in the freezer when I got home. Tonight I took it out and put the whole thing frozen into the 9L pressure cooker with about 4 L of water. Cooked them for 2 hours, which was enough to liquefy the fruit and separate the skins, seeds and bits of stem. Mashing with a potato masher helps too. Then you do the first strain through a colander for the big stuff. Next is with cheese cloth over a strainer. This takes some patience because this is when you are straining out the hairs that form a thick paste. So you have to pour carefully and stir gently and slowly to get as much juice out of the paste as possible.

When this was done, I rinsed the cheese cloth and ran it through again, but probably didn't need to. I did up a good thick sugar syrup and poured it in, let it blend, and then added two bottles of vodka. Sugar is a personal taste thing, but you really do have to have it. Rosehips' claim to fame is the incredible content of Vitamin C - and that's also called Ascorbic acid. The liquor is more acidic by a long way than straight lemon juice, so yeah. Sugar. Lots and lots of sugar.

Give it a little stir and jar or bottle it. With that much acid, sugar and alcohol that stuff is NEVEr going to go off.

UPDATE:

The finished product. About 6 L. A kilo or so of rosehips boiled for 2 hours in a pressure cooker with 3 L of water, a full kilo of sugar and 1.5 L vodka + as little water as possible added to the sugar just to make a syrup.

Good eats

I guess this is getting down to monthly posts. I know. I was always posting more before I got addicted to Facebook. It's Zuckerberg's fault. I used to toss everything up onto this site, and then there was FB and Twitter and all manner of distractions. Still, I haven't forgotten the Home Blog.

~

Made Pastizzi for lunch today. Much better this time than my other attempts. (Followed a recipe. That seems to work. Who knew?)






A VERy traditional Maltese treat: pea pastizzi.

Take:
1 cup of dried split peas
pinch salt/half porcini mushroom soup cube
1 onion, chopped v. fine
1 clove garlic, minced
handful of chopped fresh mint
tablespoon curry powder
olive oil

Prepared puff pastry (from the supermarket, cause I ain't an idjit)

Soak the peas overnight. Drain and rinse, then put in a pot with about double the volume of water simmer with the salt, very low until soft. Boil off remaining water (don't strain).

Saute the onion, mint & garlic with the olive oil. When starting to go transparent, add in the peas + a cup of water & curry powder. Simmer together until it's all a nice paste and the water is all gone. Be VERy careful not to let it burn; stir a lot and don't leave it alone,

Set the filling aside to cool.

Cut 8 cm rounds of puff pastry and form in your hands into a pocket. Fill with a tablespoon + of the filling, brush the edges with egg and seal. Bake at 200 for 15 minutes.

~

In Malta these are sold every morning at every coffee shop, best eaten still warm from the oven. It's one of those nice traditional things that hasn't changed; you can't get them at all after 12 o'clock. They are also to be had filled with ricotta but I like the peas better.

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Hi Gerard! I like your bees. Lovely lovely lovely! How envious I am! To be able to live in Ireland in the country on your own land, and have monkish bees!

It makes me homesick.


Here are Gerard's piggies, hilariously named "Rashers" and "Sausages" + a nice long shot of his beautiful homestead garden in Ireland.


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Popped over to the farm shop yesterday to pick up some bug spray for the morning glories (they ALWays get spidermites... v. annoying) and saw they're selling brassica seedlings. How the year does tick by, like a big clock with each place on the face marked by things to plant, things to sow, things to pick, seeds to collect, earth to turn over and all in their appointed time...

I built the big orto bed just in time this summer to get the cantaloupes into the ground to produce a little fruit. There are six that will almost certainly get to full size plus a couple more that might make it if the weather stays warm long enough. But they're only filling half the bed.

The other section isn't filled with earth yet, but I was planning on putting the Romanesco broccoli in it. It was the easiest of the brassicas to grow last year and happens also to be the one I like best, so we're going to go full out this year. But it means it's time to plant the autumn veg, and I have to build at least two more beds and fill them with earth.

The one I've got ready to fill now will take 20+ buckets of composted soil from the big pile, which is a job I'm not looking forward to doing in the blistering August heat. I've been tossing lots of cut weeds and other organics in that will be the start. I'm really happy with the way the hugelkultur beds have done in the summer, so there's going to be more of that. But it's a job of work, and no fun to do in the heat. Anyway, mustn't complain; once it's done it's done and doesn't have to be done again.

Building the beds is pretty easy - not complicated. It really just involves doggedly going back and forth with the tufa blocks. One at a time. The big bed took about 45. They weigh about 20 pounds each. It's actually pretty fun, but not something you want to do in August when it's still 32 degrees every day.


It might stil be hot but the plants know when the autumn is coming. Last year my romanesco broccoli did really well, and it's my favourite veg ever, freezes well and always tastes wonderful. I only did ten I think, but this year will skip the cauliflower & red cabbage and do a LOT more broc. I really could just live on the stuff.

But of course, it has to go in soon. I did mine Sept. 14th last year, almost a month after my landlady Annamaria did hers and she got much bigger and better results. (She's been gardening on this plot her whole life, so I always try to do what she tells me.) But it means a lot of prep, and doing that in this heat...

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I love this old Irish poem. It's a kind of summation of what life is supposed to be.

REAPING BLESSING
God, bless Thou Thyself my reaping
Each ridge, and plain, and field,
Each sickle curved, shapely, hard,
Each ear and handful in the sheaf,
Each ear and handful in the sheaf.

Bless each maiden and youth,
Each woman and tender youngling,
Safeguard them beneath Thy shield of strength,
And guard them in the house of the saints,
Guard them in the house of the saints.

Encompass each goat, sheep and lamb,
Each cow and horse, and store,
Surround Thou the flocks and herds,
And tend them to a kindly fold,
Tend them to a kindly fold.

For the sake of Michael head of hosts,
Of Mary fair-skinned branch of grace,
Of Bride smooth-white of tingleted locks,
Of Columba of the graves and tombs,
Columba of the graves and tombs.

~

I once had a nice young Benedictine monk - Quebecois - start in horror and fear when I said I wanted to visit Le Barroux or Fontgombault. He jumped up and said, "But.... they are *integrists*!!!" as though he had said they were cannibals. I was rather shocked. I still am when people use the term "integrist" or "ingegralist" as a bad thing. I thought the whole point of Catholicism was to create a completely integrated civilisation, in which every aspect of life - even the most practical - is imbued with the sacred, one that blesses and sacralises and elevates us in every last detail of our lives.

I don't understand a Catholicism that holds up anything else, anything less, as an "ideal".



~

Fried pumpkin flowers

Right, that's a keeper...

Having finally learned the difference between male and female flowers on my pumpkin plants, I collected a few of the male flowers to eat this morning. They are very popular among the Italians, but I had no idea how to do them apart from the deep-fried-in-batter-with-cheese thing you get in Rome restaurants.

Not having a deep fat frier I just washed them in cool water, sliced them in half (and plucked out the dead ants) dipped them in a bit of whisked egg, then dredged in some seasoned flour, and fried them in less than an inch of hot olive oil in the bottom of my cast iron enamel pot.

They're completely addictive.

Before.

After.

Also, discovered that if you cut them young enough, even halloween pumpkins are very tasty, like dense zucchini, sliced thin and deep fried the same way.

Before and After: some gardening pics

Steve has kindly posted the piece I did on the medieval "Hortus Conclusus" - a surprisingly complex and multi-layered concept that combines practical gardening techniques with monastic mysticism.

Hortus Conclusus: My Medieval Garden, Inauthenticity, and The Real


in which we find connections between medieval gardens, Byzantine carved onyx chalices, the Venetian Trinket Principle and Cardinal Dolan at the Met Gala...

"The first time I went to Venice by myself I must have taken 1000+ pictures. As everyone is, I was overwhelmed by the Realness of Venice. I was in a kind of panic to take some of that essence of Realness home with me. But when I got home I didn’t know what to do with a thousand pictures. This, I suppose, is a useful analogy for the Church too. We saw the Venetian Trinket Principle at work at the vulgar spectacle of that Met Gala that happened while I was looking at medieval carved stones in Venice. One of the worst, most embarrassing, aspects of it was the grinning presence of those Catholic prelates, men who appear to be just as duped by the lies of the modern world as the celebrities dressed up as the Virgin Mary. These are supposed to be the men who carry the Ultimate Real with them to offer to the world, but they’ve forgotten somehow."

Anyway. Steve only posted a few pics of the garden, and I love before and after and how-to kinds of things. So, here's a few more...


The Big Dry Patch, shortly after I moved in.

Add caption

The same spot in mid-February this year

Taken yesterday afternoon from just about the same spot.


I have about 200 square meters. When I moved here the patch had been left dormant for several years, and its clay soil that had been rototilled every spring and autumn for many years had baked into an impenetrable grey brick in which absolutely nothing was growing except the trees and a few very hardy and determined weeds. This is because of the typical Italian contadina style of vegetable gardening that leaves large patches of soil bare, which also wastes a great deal of water - an issue which made us all nervous last summer as the drought brought the well level down.

It works well in good years for the purpose of growing typical Italian orto favourites: tomatoes, squash, aubergines and fava beans. Soil fertility isn't really an issue here, especially if you're growing just the usual Italian favourites, legumes, nightshades and brassicas. My own brassicas - fibonacci broccoli, white cauliflower, cime di rapa and Tuscan black kale, did wonderfully this winter (the red cabbage not so much). But if you like root vegetables (except for aliums) it's hopeless. My poor carrots tried... they really did.

And if you like an English style mixed garden of herbs and flowers you have to do quite a lot of work, because really only raised beds and careful soil amendment will produce the results. So, almost as soon as I got here, (and mainly as a form of mental therapy) I started digging. Prozac might work for some people, but I've found one of the best anti-depressants/anti-anxiety drugs is dirt. And of course, for exercise, little can beat lifting tufa blocks, pulling weeds and taking huge overhead swings at the earth with an iron mattock.

The trouble this garden had is that top-tilling destroys the soil's natural substructure. I've been reading Roger Brook, an advocate of the no-dig method who explained how clay soil works:

Soil structure is not just much loved crumbs in a handful of soil, it belongs to the whole soil profile.  A good soil is honeycombed with channels, cracks and connections through which air and water can move. Worms wriggle and spread organic fertility. Worm-casts accumulate on the surface to enable a fine tilth. A firm settled surface gives the gardener access in all kinds of weather without causing compaction. Most of the gardening world confuses a firm settled surface with compaction!

There are various methods to improving this kind of soil, and I'm trying a combination of things to see what works best. Part of the orto (vegetable patch) I'm just leaving as is, and planting direct into the native soil - several rows of onions and garlic, as well as a great crop of coriander are doing very well. And as I said, my brassicas loved this soil and I have a freezer full of broccoli and cauliflower and other greens to last all summer. Tomatoes also love it (though I'm taking it easy on poms this year, since I've still got about 30 pounds in the freezer).

But I'm also building small raised beds - and learning wattling techniques - that I'm filling partly with pulled weeds. This wattle bed, one of two, started life as a pile of pulled weeds from around the garden. I just raked it all up into a pile and put in the stakes around it, did the wattle and then filled with Annamaria's family compost.

A few days ago, I dug into the soil and there were so many worms it was difficult to find a spot safe to dig down. Worms are a rarity in the native soil, so this is obviously a good sign.


Did the second, smaller one,  at the end of March, and a rectangular one on the end with sides built of terracotta roofing tiles. (Ran out of fruit pruning sticks.)

Here they are all planted out with peppers and some marigolds. The twigs between the plants are to discourage the kitties... we've got eleven cats here. No mice. I've sown a lot of ground cover white clover so when the seeds start sprouting you can take the twigs away and it looks much nicer.
















I've also been trying Hugelkultur, a very old method of building raised beds in which you bury a great deal of woody and green matter and pile the native soil up on top.

After I built the tufa block wall, I thought it would be fun to grow a row of sunflowers and put in some climbing morning glories to create a kind of flowery fourth wall of the square garden. But looking at the very hard clay soil I thought the flowers would have difficulties rooting, so took this as a chance to try the hugel bed method.

The logs were already sitting around on the Patch, and obviously had been for a long time. Half rotted logs are perfect. The idea is that they absorb water in the wet season and hold it like a sponge that the plants can then use through the drier spells. The wood breaks down and adds organic matter and nutrients to the soil over a long period.

Then you cover it over with smaller woody material, dried leaves, dried grasses and weeds. This is the carbon layer. This is covered over with half-rotted green compost for lots of nitrogen.

Then you replace the soil, top dress with finished compost, and sow it all over with a ground cover - white clover produces good shade leaf cover, meshes well, is drought resistant and as a nitrogen-fixing legume adds nutrients to the soil. To this I added wildflower mix, lots and lots of morning glory seeds and sunflowers - that have nice long tap roots. Then I put in my trellises, built from Annamaria's fruit tree prunings.

And this is what it looks like today. The large plants are squashes (mystery squash) that started from seeds that had failed to completely break down in the winter compost. There are quite a few "wild" squashes and tomatoes too. (Obviously I'm going to have to up my composting game.)

I've decided to leave the squash where they are, and take care of the rest of the patch by putting down some black plastic mulch. This will protect whatever fruit comes along, and suppress weeds and give me some time to think about what I'm going to do with the rest of this section.










I'm just very pleased with the results overall.

It's producing exactly the lush effect I was hoping for.

Here's the second hugel berm, a 1/4 circle around the base of the hazel tree.

A big part of medieval gardening technique is to completely cover the soil. Every inch should be covered either with plants or ground cover or mulch or a combination of all three. The white clover is doing a great job of this, and I can already see great improvement in soil quality where it has taken well. It doesn't like sprouting directly in the clay, however. Takes quite a lot of coaxing. More boosting for top dressing everything with compost.










Medieval garden design, based on the atrium gardens of Roman houses, always have a square layout of narrow, rectangular low raised beds surrounding a round central feature. In my case the beautiful loquat tree Annamaria's mother planted 15 years ago was the obvious place to start. You can see it to the left in the first pic of the Big Dry Patch.

I started the Big Round Bed right away, but we got hit by the Horrible Heat Wave - 16 weeks of awful African wind blowing the whole world into a new desert all summer - and pretty much all outdoor work ceased.

But a friend came to visit in September and we were able to get it finished. The blocks are tufa and instead of top dressing, we mixed compost into the native clay soil, something I wouldn't do now.

I planted a few herbs - thyme, majoram, a lavender, some rockweed, bought from the shop and saved from the garden in Norcia, and put in daffodil bulbs in bunches in November, scattered it all over with dead leaves and waited.

As the "winter" progressed, I transplanted a lot of things we found here and there - lots of chamomile which grows wild here and starts coming up in January, some wild calendula, white campion and melissa, field poppies, lesser celandine (that in Italian are called "buttone d'oro") salvia and a few rows of garlic, and all did very well. In the long planters are some white onions from starts.

All the transplants had a good winter to settle in, and I set about building the rest of the beds, defining the space, and laying down a lot of wood chip mulch. At first the pacciame was to deal with the muddy clay soil which was a pain to walk on. Then I started reading about how wood chip mulch is the solution to all your problems, especially if you have heavy clay. So now I'm looking around to find a more practical large volume source. It's great stuff, but a 40 L bag doesn't go very far and they're 8 Euros a piece. I really just need a truck load. There's a firewood lady who brings me my stove wood who might be a good person to ask. There's also a horse farm up the hill a bit and I'm willing to bet Annamaria knows them.

Here it is about three weeks ago.

And here it is today.

By the end of March there was quite a change. The basic layout of the garden was finished, and the beds had been settling. The foreground here was just built straight into the native soil around three young grape vines. Into this I added about 40 garlic plants. The two rectangular beds on the left are filled with finished compost from the Pettirossi family compost pile, a hundred years old. They're planted with a mix of flowers and herbs,

The same spot two months later.

and a patch of strawberries.

The area behind the shed and right in front of the grape/garlic bed, was just piled up with old tomato canes, bits of wood and odds and ends. I cleared all this away and built a large tufa-block bed. It gets full sun all day so it's where I'm going to put all  my sun-loving tall flowers, sunflowers, hollyhocks, foxgloves and gladiolus.

Along the back wall of the property, I had already put a bed in for the acanthus that you can see behind this. I've started a brick path in a traditional layout, but this is something of an ongoing project.

Here's a little corner of it today, with the transplanted field poppy doing nicely, and glads coming up. Must finish the trellis before the morning glories get too big.

The whole thing is sown with flower seeds. For some reason I've not had my usual good luck with the nasturtiums. I keep putting them in and niente. But everything else is sprouting.

The sandy gravel path divides the ornamental "hortus conclusus" from the orto. Of course, weeds were not nearly as deterred by it as I had hoped. But I still think it looks quite nice... in a rustico sort of way.











The orto section is another matter, and hasn't had nearly the attention I've given the first bit. But I'm starting to think about it and make some plans. But digging in tufa blocks or even the thin terracotta roofing tiles for raised beds isn't something you can do in the warm season. The clay soil bakes so hard that even the mattock bounces right off. I've been able to dig it a bit, since we've had some rain, and by dumping buckets of water on the bits I want to dig, but building beds is a winter activity, so we're pretty much done for the season.

There are advantages to clay. The fibonacci broccoli loved it, and it's one of my all-time favourite vegetables, so there's going to be a lot more of it from now on. I'm going to leave a good bit of the orto as it is, planted in rows in the traditional Italian way. Though I think I'll also take Charles Dowding's methods and start loading compost on top, as well as burying green matter in patches, which also seems to work well.





Just separating off sections and dealing with the soil in patches, and mulching heavily around the patches and beds, seems to be the best strategy.

Here's my first round wattle - olive branches - in early March. I put it up around the rhubarb, at the base of the plum tree, so it wouldn't get stepped on as it was sprouting. At some point rhubarb needs to have its root divided, so when it comes to digging it up it will be a chance to give it its own raised bed.

But for now it seems happy enough where it is.

Built quite a lot of trellises out of the fruit tree prunings.

Grapes are doing well too. We had a bad sharp frost late in April last year, just as the fruiting plants were putting out flowers, so no one got any grapes. Then the drought ruined all the soft fruits. So far much better luck this year. No late frost and a good generous mix of rain and sun. Annamaria says these are purple table grapes, and there's lots of little sprouts already.

The first side bed. Sown with sweet peas, but they've been very reluctant to germinate. Apparently this is quite common. I'm going to have to step up my seed-starting game too.

After. I'll have to cut the chamomile today. There's a little miniature rose in there somewhere that isn't getting much light.

The most recent project was this third large hugel berm, in the sunniest spot, for cukes, zucchini, pumpkins and cantaloupes. There's a lot of hardwood in a trench, a good 10 inches deep, and then a layer of dried grass cuttings, pulled weeds, half finished compost and several buckets of finished compost.

In front of this I'm going to put up a lean-to trellis so the fruit won't sit on the ground.

It's right behind this trellis, which on one side is morning glories, and the other is pole beans. In front of the pole beans will be just enough room for the last of my red peppers.



















And that's about it so far.

Except for the obligatory kitty-pics...

Henry and Pippy have discovered there's a bird's nest under the roof tiles of the shed.

Bertie inspecting the new canes, ready to be put up on the terrace for the morning glory trellis.

Stealthcat





A beautiful evening last night.



~

Labora

Built another one. Nearly out of sticks from this year's prunings. Just enough left to do some more trellising. This one is lower because I'm going to put runner beans in. The taller one is for beetroot (already sown) that needs more depth of soil.

Note how dry and cracked the soil is. This is after weeks of constant tremendous downpours in Feb & March, followed by three weeks of cold, sunny days with a lot of wind. This is what clay soil does, and it turns rock hard. The only thing to do is mulch and build raised beds. Long process.

I've done beds and wood chip mulching in the ornamental/herb garden, but the orto is going to take a lot of work that I'm mostly going to have to save for next winter. One thing I'm doing is sowing everything with white clover seed. This is a plant that "fixes nitrogen," pulls it right out of hte air and pumps it into the soil through nodes in the roots. It helps the soil retain water and the leaves shade the soil from the sun and protect it from wind and reduces evaporation and helps the clay soil by retaining water below the surface, preventing that cracking and the formation of a hard crust.

This is an old medieval gardening trick. Medieval pottager or herb gardens were always set up with raised beds and paths, so no one ever walked on the places you plant and sow, and there was absolutely no bare, exposed soil. Grass on the paths was common, but here would take too much water in the summer to keep it alive. I don't want to do sand or gravel paths, because that would just be adding stones to soil I'm trying to reconstitute. I'm trying hugel beds as well, where you bury woody material along with half-finished green compost. These take about three years to really get results, but it's supposed to be great for clay.

But it's tricky to manage no matter what you do. You have to make absolutely sure never to walk on anything you intend to plant. Make paths, and stick to them for your feet, and then mulch the heck out of the paths with an organic mulch, so walking on it forces organic material into the soil. I'm mixing white clover seed, which you can buy in bulk, with composted soil and peat/wood mulch compost, and sprinkling it over the clay beds. The green looking bit in the back of this photo shows the difference it makes.

The Patch was rototilled every year for many years when Annamaria's mum lived here, and it has left the soil in dire condition. It's the reason absolutely nothing but a few VERy hardy and determined weeds would grow on it. The grass from Franco's orchard stopped in a clear line where Annamaria's mum's garden started. The soil is so hard packed after decades of tilling even the grass wouldn't encroach on it.

Frankly, it's a ton of work, but I'm enjoying this project immensely. What a thrill to bring life back to it!




Plum, always the first to bloom...



Hugelkultur; a Swiss thing I think, in which you bury half-rotted wood and dry sticks and brown compost, cover with a layer of green compost, and then pile on the soil from the trench. Sow with a cover crop like clover and plant with whatever you like. Three years later, the soil will be completely reconditioned.




Since childhood, my favourite flowers. A sign of spring and new hope. A new start, and a way back from winter.

Happy Easter.